Alex Shanahan goes undercover
to expose a deadly crime ring
at 30,000 feet—in Lynne Heitman’s
FIRST CLASS KILLING
“This action-filled thriller packs an erotic punch…gathers strength as it goes along.”
—The Boston Globe
“Enthralling…. A very compelling crime thriller complete with blackmail, murder, and an internet-run prostitute ring…. The well-written storyline [leaves] the audience eagerly turning the pages.”
—Harriet Klausner, barnesandnoble.com
“Get ready for the plane ride of your life…. Heitman is an excellent storyteller who creates wonderful and believable characters…. First Class Killing will leave readers eagerly awaiting the next Alex Shanahan novel.”
—Old Book Barn Gazette
HARD LANDING
“A confession: I love to have an insider from a field I thought I understood show me how I was wrong. Lynne Heitman’s debut mystery, Hard Landing, delves beneath the ticket counters and departure gates to expose how both a major airline and a major airport really work. The Boston settings are dead-on, and Alexandra Shanahan is credibly tough and genuinely sensitive at all the right times. Highly recommended.”
—Jeremiah Healy, Shamus Award–winning author of Turnabout
“Hard Landing goes down easy, and will keep you guessing—and flipping pages—till three a.m.”
—John J. Nance, New York Times bestselling author of Orbit
“There’s something mysterious happening at Boston’s Logan International Airport, and the novel’s heroine, Alex Shanahan, the new manager of the fictitious Majestic Airlines, is thrust into the middle of it. Fasten your seat belt—this story, written by an airline industry insider, is exciting from start to finish.”
—American Way, American Airlines’ in-flight magazine
“Sometimes a reviewer just wants to read a book because it’s good…this is…a good novel…. Heitman leads Alex in a lively dance.”
—The Boston Globe
“An edge-of-your seat thriller that sweeps you up and carries you along for the ride.”
—Lisa Gardner, New York Times bestselling author of Gone
“Terrific…twists and turns and keeps you on the edge of your seat.”
—Kate Mattes, Kate’s Mystery Books
TARMAC
“Fast-moving and as fascinating as a natural disaster, the novel is suspenseful and electric and has the appeal of any insider story. Ms. Heitman is a former airline employee of 14 years, and her words ring true.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“A fast-paced thriller that kept me turning the pages into the night…you can practically smell the grease and gasoline.”
—Kate Mattes, Kate’s Mystery Books
“An intricate and explosive thriller…evocative prose…[a] tightly woven, compelling read. One of the year’s most notable thrillers.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Heitman is proving to be an accomplished thriller writer.”
—Bookseller Star Ratings
“Truly excellent…the best white-knuckle ride I’ve taken in a long time.”
—Lee Child, New York Times bestselling author of One Shot
“[Tarmac] needs no blurbs…the book can lift off for itself.”
—The Boston Globe
“…the story kept me turning the pages rapidly…. Recommended.”
—Barbara Franchi, reviewingtheevidence.com
Also by Lynne Heitman
HARD LANDING
TARMAC
FIRST CLASS KILLING
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Lynne Heitman
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Prologue
MY ASSIGNMENT IS TO KILL THE HOSTAGES. I HAVE GROWN to like some of them over our ten days together, but my duty is clear. The army is gathering outside the airplane. It is time to execute the plan. We all know our places. We all go to our duties. I dig an extra clip out of the bag. I do not know how many rounds it will take.
I stop at the front of the airplane, in the section that we have reserved for ourselves to pray. Then I go back through the curtains, and when they look at me, they know. By the way I hold the Kalashnikov or by the way I stand or by the way I look at them. Something tells them I am there to finish it.
But I’ve never killed anyone before. I’ve dreamed of it. I lied about it to be part of this operation, but I have never done it before. I level the rifle. The first one gets down on the floor between the seats and curls into a ball. I point the barrel at his head and fire. The recoil jams my shoulder back. When the bullet hits, it stops him in the middle of a scream. His head ruptures.
The others run like frightened beasts. They climb over the backs of the seats. They stumble and fall and step on each other, but there is no place for them to go. I smell the fear. They should die like men, as we all will soon.
Outside, firing begins. At first it is like rain, a sprinkling against the outside of the airplane. But then the deluge. The first bomb goes off. The floor rises up, then drops from under me. A wave of pressure pushes me down. My ears hurt, and when I get to my knees, I can’t hear. One of them is coming. I find the rifle and shoot. He’s screaming, but I can’t hear, and he keeps coming. I shoot again, and he falls. When I try to stand, there is too much smoke. My eyes burn, but I can still see they are all coming. Their faces look like my son’s crayon drawings. I try to raise the rifle again, but they push me down and step on me as they go over.
Another bomb goes off. The seats are on fire. The air feels greasy, like kerosene. Because I can’t hear, everything feels slow. I crawl up the aisle. A man with blood on his face and his arms on fire runs toward me. He bumps into something and falls backward. On the floor in front of me, he twists and kicks and turns and screams until he is still. I pull myself into one of the seats. And I wait.
1
HARVEY BALTIMORE’S HOUSE WAS DYING. ONCE STATELY, the Tudor had become an embarrassment to its Brookline neighbors. Glossy black paint flaked off the shutters, the pocked shingled roof covered the house like a disease, and the other half of the duplex, which had long been a source of good, steady income for Harvey, had been vacant and closed off for almost six months. The dwelling, like its owner, seemed to be declining at an accelerating pace.
The doorbell was broken. I let myself in with my key. For someone as private as Harvey, giving me the key to his house had been a monumental concession, but it only made sense. He wasn’t exactly mobile anymore.
“It’s me,” I called out while I wiped my shoes on the welcome mat in his foyer. No response, as usual, but I knew what I would find. If it was a good day, he would be clean-shaven, reading his newspaper by the light of the sun slanting through open blinds. If it was a bad day, he’d be sitting at his computer in the dark, unshaven, playing Minesweeper. Either way, he’d be in his wheelchair, his body ravaged by the multiple sclerosis that had been stealing function from him in excruciating incremen
ts. I hoped for a good day. There hadn’t been enough of those lately.
“Harvey, your shutters are flaking. We need to get them—” I rounded the corner, walked into the office, and stopped.
Harvey was there, all right, and it must have been a good day—a very good day—because there he sat in his wheelchair, engaged in a passionate kiss with the woman on his lap. At least, until I’d barreled in, at which point they tore themselves away from each other to stare at me.
Too late to back out unnoticed. I was too embarrassed to go in any further. “I’m sorry…I’ll just…I didn’t…” have any idea what to say.
“Oh, my.” Harvey went every shade of red and some from the orange spectrum. Despite his confinement to the chair, he managed to do a lot of fluttering about, mostly with his hands. He encouraged the woman off her perch. She slipped off easily, stepping gingerly so as not to get entangled in the workings of the wheelchair. Of the three of us, she was the only one who didn’t look as if she wanted to curl up into a ball and roll out of there.
I took a step back. “I can just leave you two and, um…come back later.”
“No,” Harvey stammered. “Please stay. It is I who should apologize.”
“Why should we apologize?” The woman seemed more annoyed than embarrassed, as if I had just tracked mud into her clean house. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”
She was petite and fragile-looking, a good thing to be if your habit is to sit on the legs of wheelchair-bound men. She was also vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t imagine where I might have seen her before. She wore her chestnut hair cut in a short, shaggy bob. Her tight cotton slacks stopped just above her ankles, and her high-top basketball shoes were tied with thick white laces. She could have passed for a twelve-year-old boy except for her eyes. I took a closer look at those eyes, and I knew who she was.
“You’re Rachel.”
“Do I know you?”
Since Harvey couldn’t seem to find his voice, I did the honors. “I’m Alexandra Shanahan, Harvey’s business partner.”
She smiled down at Harvey. “You told her about me?”
I pointed to the picture on Harvey’s desk, the only personal photograph on display in the entire house and one of the few things she hadn’t taken when she’d walked out on him six years before, two years before I’d met him. I had caught Harvey making out with his ex-wife. No wonder he couldn’t find his voice, and no wonder I hadn’t recognized her right away. She didn’t look anything like her photo, especially with the flowing locks cut short.
“Would you like a cup?” Rachel must have noticed me staring at the full china tea service set up on the coffee table. Harvey hadn’t been able to make his own tea since he’d dumped a full pot of hot Darjeeling in his lap. That meant she’d made it, which meant she’d been there for a while.
“Harvey said you would be coming, so I made enough for three.”
“No, thanks. I’m good.” I set the cup I’d brought from Tealuxe on the desk. Harvey’s favorite blend had gone cold anyway.
Harvey cleared his throat and waded in. “Rachel has a job for us. I asked her to wait until you arrived to detail it.”
“Both of us?”
“But of course. Why would you—” He blinked at me and reached up to scratch his head, bumping his glasses in the process. “Oh, my, no. That was just…it has been a long time since we have seen each other, and…”
“I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I’m just surprised. I didn’t know you two were…together.”
“Together?” Rachel laughed. “This is the first time we’ve seen each other in how long?” She reached over and straightened Harvey’s collar. Then she just went ahead and hoisted one petite haunch up on the armrest of his chair. “Four years?”
“Yes,” he said. “Almost.”
“We were talking and reminiscing about how much I used to enjoy giving him his back rubs, and one thing led to another—”
And that was all I needed to know. “What kind of a job?”
“I need someone to go to my house in Quincy and pick up a few things. Some family photos, mostly, and some jewelry. Some things my mother gave me.” She glanced at Harvey with a shy smile. “Some things Harvey gave me.”
“Quincy? I thought you lived around here.”
“We moved a few months ago.”
“Why can’t you get that stuff yourself?”
“Because I’m afraid my husband”—she glanced down at Harvey—“my soon-to-be-ex-husband will kill me.”
“Did he threaten you?”
She wrapped her arms around her as if a sudden draft had blown through. “The last time he beat me, he nearly killed me.”
I looked for visible bruises or scars. That she didn’t have any didn’t mean she was lying, but we had done work before for women who had been beaten down by men they loved. The battering didn’t always leave physical evidence, but it never failed to leave some part of them shattered, some part they couldn’t hide. Rachel looked whole to me.
“What did the police say?”
“You know how that is.” She laughed nervously. “I have no real recourse until he kills me.”
“Do you have a restraining order?”
“Yes. But he has two legs and a car, and when he’s drinking, there’s nothing that’ll stop him.”
“Why come to us?”
“Because Harvey’s a private investigator.” She stood up, stepped behind Harvey, and settled one hand on each of his shoulders. “I didn’t know about his current condition. I wish someone had told me things had gotten this bad.” She glared at me as though I were personally responsible for his MS.
Harvey seemed torn between basking in her attention and wanting to dive under his wheelchair. Public displays of affection were not his thing.
“Rachel,” I said, “do you mind giving us a minute?”
She looked down at Harvey. He found her hand, pulled it down to his lips, and kissed it. They locked eyes and held that pose until he nodded. I sensed the slightest bit of triumph behind her smile as she passed without looking at me. I had known the woman all of ten minutes, and I couldn’t stand her. Of course, I had despised the idea of her and what she had done to Harvey almost since I had known him.
To Harvey, Rachel was an angel, the only woman except his mother who had ever loved him. That she had dumped him for a younger, prettier boy when he’d been diagnosed mattered not, because love makes you stupid. But when I looked at her picture, I had always seen something in her eyes that made me think she wasn’t the angel he thought her to be.
“Please, forgive me.” Harvey was clearly embarrassed, and yet he couldn’t stop smiling. “That was—”
“Look, Harvey, you’re an adult, and your business is your business.” I went over, sat on the couch, and looked across the tea service at him. “But isn’t she still married?”
“Separated.”
“How long?”
“Eight months.”
The question was, what did she want? Harvey didn’t have any money. Neither one of us did. “Do you believe—” Scratch that. He obviously believed her. “Has her husband been stalking her?”
“I did not ask.”
“Did you know that her husband was abusing her?”
“No.”
“Has she called you even once over the past four years?”
“No.” He fiddled with the loose leather cushion on the arm of the wheelchair. I’d been meaning to tighten it and kept forgetting. “Nor have I called her.”
“Is she planning on sticking around after we collect her stuff for her? I mean, I hate to be so skeptical, but doesn’t this all seem to be coming out of the blue and moving really, really fast?”
He started to huff and puff. “You would expect what? That I would say no? That I would throw her out of my house and leave her to her own devices?”
Her own devices seemed to be in fine working order to me. “If I’m not mistaken, she tried to take this house from you in the
divorce proceedings.”
“Are you telling me that you will not take this assignment?”
“Is she paying us?” He stared at me as if I’d just poked him in the eye. How had I become the bad guy? “She left you, Harvey. She hurt you. Now she wants you to help her out of a jam with the guy she left you for. I’m only…I’m just asking that you be sure before you get involved with her again.”
“She came to me because she trusts me.” His voice was quiet but firm. “I could no more turn her away than I could turn you away in a time of need.”
There it was. In one deft stroke, he had revealed the essence of his relationship with each of us, stated his priorities, and ended the discussion. Rachel could ask him to walk over hot coals in his bare feet, and he would ask me to hold his shoes. I would do it because I would do anything for him. I sat back and started getting used to the idea of working for Rachel.
“I’ll do it for you, Harvey. Not for her.”
He took off his glasses, found a cloth in his saddlebag, and cleaned them with a determination that wasn’t required. He put the glasses back on and looked at me with a steady gaze as he folded the cloth. “Thank you.”
I went over to the door and called Rachel back in. Harvey beamed at her. “We will be more than happy to help you with your problem.”
She smiled for him, and I got a bad feeling.
2
THERE WERE TWO WAYS TO GET TO QUINCY. YOU EITHER took the red line on the T, or you sat on I-93 along with everyone else trying to go south through the Big Dig construction. I decided not to waste my hour in traffic, so the minute I hit the end of the on ramp and inched into the flow, I grabbed my cell phone and turbo-dialed Dan.
“Majestic Airlines, Dan Fallacaro.”
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“I’m working, Shanahan. I don’t have time.”
“Wait…”
“What?”
“You’re going to want to hear this.” I filled him in on how I’d found Harvey in a clinch with his ex-wife.
“Are you shitting me? You’re talking about our Harvey, right?”
I was talking about our Harvey. Dan Fallacaro was the mutual friend who had introduced us. Dan had worked for me during my brief but eventful tenure as the general manager for Majestic Airlines at Logan. The murky circumstances of my departure from that job had left me virtually unemployable in the airline business. The circumstances weren’t murky to Dan, and he had worked hard to help me get started in my new life as a private investigator. He knew a forensic accountant who had done some financial work for him in the matter of his divorce from his lunatic ex-wife. Harvey Baltimore needed a partner with fresh legs, or…just legs. I needed work. Dan had made the match.
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